Reviews by MathBrush

Jesse Stavros Doorway is a mid length game about a collection of people with the ability to travel through space and time. There is a good chunk of backstory available in-game.

The game is large, with complex implementation, but it needs more beta testing; there are capitalization errors and "printed name" inform issues.

The setting is interesting, with a bunch of hippies time traveling to a grateful dead concert. The writing is descriptive.

I played with a walkthrough, as many actions were hard to come up with on my own.

This mid-length Twine game has you looking for a solid quicksilver pickaxe enchanted by dwarfs. It's twine, with items and exits implemented in a sequence of rooms.

At several places, there are complicated locks or other mechanisms to fiddle with. I found these to be frustrating. Overqll, the setting was the best part of the game.

This game uses a setting not commonly explored: Pakistan, with a young girl protagonist.

This game uses a branch and bottleneck structure, and is fairly short., with a dozen or so choices on average.

I found the explora5ion of unfamiliar culture and issues fascinating. The game played smoothly, and the writing was descriptive.

This is perhaps paperblurts most compelling story for me, but also the most troublesome content. You play a serial killer who just can't get enough of killing.

The pacing, the graphics and animations, are all excellent, although it drags on to six acts.

It goes into detail about the gore, but it's over the top, silly gore.

The story gets interesting with the addition of a couple of major npc's. Both of them get wrapped up in a somewhat rushed way. Also there is no save feature for this long game with many slow pauses.

This is a short hypertext game about two people, one on a bike and one running. The screen is split into two windows, one for each story.

Each story has a sequence of 8 or so binary choices. You can either play as one character the whole time, with the other character's choices proceeding on its own, or you can play both characters at once (although you still make just one choice each 'second').

I found the story to be really short, and looking back and forth at the two panels detracted from the slice of life style of the story. However, it was well done in a technical way.

Tower was the second game entered by Simon Deimel in ifcomp 2014, and to be honest, I prefer Enigma, a well-written drama.

This game, Tower, leans heavily on classic IF tropes: locked doors and keys, amnesia, a dragon, an unusual combination lock, a generic fantasy setting. The descriptions are spare, but everything runs fairly smoothly.

Still, I wouldn't mind playing this game again. It's fun wandering around and trying everything.

Andrew Schultz is known for taking a word puzzle idea (like anagrams or reversible compound nouns) and running with it. Most of his games encourage you to explore the world first to figure out what the theme is, so I won't give away the theme in this game.

The world is spare and empty, but this helps identify key items. The game is also highly polished, with no bugs or typos that I am aware of.

The mechanic in this game is harder to do by hand than his other games, resulting in either frustration or grinding, unless you're in the mood for it.

Overall, this game works, but his other games (especially shuffling around, threediopolis or their sequels) worked better for me.

This game starts out as an illustrated twine implementation of Hugo's House of Horrors, an old game similar to Maniac Mansion.

The author has added vivid descriptions of the graphics. Not all the original game is implemented. The game has not been implemented in exactly the same way as the original as there is, for instance, new dialogue, including strong profanity.

The game begins to glitch out, as in the classic glitch creepypasta.

I felt like the horror never really took hold, although it was better at times.

It took me 20 minutes to finish the game.

This game was entered in IFCOMP 2014. Like Robin Johnsons draculaland, this game implements a hyperlink based parser system. Unlike Johnsons game, this game doesn't have scrollbars capability.

You have about a dozen verbs you can click at any time, which then gives you a menu of choices, or just guesses what you want to do.

The storyline is interesting but not gripping. You are in prison, and can bend through bars. You want to get out and bring your friends.

The interactivity in this game had some issues; actions often bring results quite different than what you would expect, making it very difficult to know how to proceed

Zest combines the talent of Richard Goodness (who later made the amusing and thoughtful Tombs of Reschette), lectroniae (a musical artist), and PaperBlurt (a frequent author of well-illustrated twine games).

In this rather long Twine game, you play as someone who works at some sort of fast food place, and can go to church or the tobacco shop to buy tobacco to 'zest'.

The game has a mix of the absurd, the mundane, and the thoughtful. You have 3 meters, including grossness, and you have to repeat the same options/tasks each day.

The game is at its most absurd in the store, or in dreams; its at its most thoughtful in its depiction of the poor, and of Christian prayers and sermons. And frequently it is both.

This game contains frequent use of the f-word.